Just a Day
by NorthernTrash-x
Summary: Unohana-centric. She had always known the colour of blood, but not like this.


Retsu Unohana. Set about five hundred years before the present story-line.

**Just a Day**

_"If you can't hold yourself together  
__Why should I hold you now?"  
_Anberlin

She had a man on the bed in front of her who suffered from haemophilia. That would not normally have been too much of a concern: he wasn't a shinigami (she treated far too many shinigami for cuts and scrapes and slashes, after all, for it to be safe for him to do something like that) so he wasn't under the line of fire and didn't have a pressing need to return to any division. If this had been a usual day, she would have given him his twice-monthly preventative infusion, or a new prescription for the herb-based drug that the Twelfth had just created, that worked quite well. In face, had this been any other day of the week or month or year, this would have been entirely routine, even, perhaps, a little mundane.

Unfortunately, this was not one of those days, and this man had just had his arm ripped off.

The still and calm of the Fourth Division wing that she ran, where normally the people walked around with a sedate air and graceful movements had suddenly mutated into something else: indeed, when she had walked in, she had thought for a moment that she had come in the wrong door, for surely this place could not be her department? Why was there a pool of alizarin-red blood on the floor, people screaming, the shinigami on duty running from one room to another? Where had those two walls gone, and why were they replaced with kido spells holding the roof up? Why was there so much dust on the floor, tracked through with frantic footprints; why was that woman curled up in the corner sobbing in such bone-wracking desperation that it seemed as if her heart would break from the pressure? Why was- oh god- there a man on a cart who was covered in a blanket and just left in the corridor?

This was not her wing- not the one for long-term residents, the one for non-serious operations and coma patients?

You didn't _scream_ if you were in a coma, did you?

A shinigami ran up to her, eyes wide and panicked, a splatter of persimmon juice on his cheek. _No, not persimmon juice, Retsu you fool- why would he be eating at a time like this?_

"What is going on?"

Her voice betrayed none of the panic and illogicalities in her head; indeed, she seemed completely composed, and the man looked at her in relief, glad that a high-ranking officer was here to take responsibility off him. He told her as he panted out his exhausted breath, before running back to the room that he had come from. This ward shared a wall with the Tenth division, and it seemed that an unranked shinigami had achieved his shikai rather _unexpectedly_… and had blasted out half of both buildings in the process, only ten minutes before. In her head she cursed the Captain for not watching the progress of his shinigami's training, before remembering that there were more important things to think about.

She went from room to room, smiling and calming and bringing fresh supplies of bandages, advice and aid to the frazzled shinigami. Many of the Fourth division members here were not under her control, but they moved with assured knowledge and pace, and so she let them be.

Then, the room at the end of the corridor, and all her carefully constructed barriers against horror shattered around her with the resounding sound of a man yelling her name, over and over again, and the frantic voices of the three shinigami in the room, who were desperately trying to stop him bleeding. His charts weren't here- of course they wouldn't be, because he was her personal patient and so they would be waiting for her at the nurses station to pick up- and these three looked young, and scared, and they had no idea why _all of that blood just would not stop coming out of him._

Amaranth on the floor; rose madder on the walls. What pretty flowers, blooming in haemoglobin brightness.

The part of her that was still working, the part of her mind that was still fourth-seat Retsu Unohana who was known for her pragmatism and inappropriately loud laughter, the shinigami who sort of had aspirations of maybe making Lieutenant one day, was apparently still working. They had attached him to a blood drip; obviously just trying to keep him alive. There was one in the bin already, and the one connected to him was nearly empty. As she watched, one of them reached up and changed it, flinging it down on the table without regard for cleanliness and hygiene. Not now, no time, no time.

The man on the bed was thrashing to and fro, whimpering intersected with screaming, slashes of sprayed crimson across his face, in his mouth. She took a deep breath as she was moving towards the other side of the bed, and saw to her dismay that not only his arm was missing, but also half of his side. Pooling underneath him on the sterile white covers was rosewood water; the burgundy shade of much darker blood, the much more dangerous sort. _Carmine- I nearly bought the new rug in that colour, but you said that it wouldn't go with the varnish on the floorboards._

He turned to her again, somehow still conscious.

"Retsu? I told them you'd get here. You'll fix me, right?"

She remembered like it was earlier this very day the first time he had walked into her department. She had only had control for a few weeks, and as a child of one of the lesser noble families, he always had the department head. He had told her that her hair was too lovely to keep so very short.

He had kissed her a week later.

They had moved in together, two months ago, and neither of them had even got around to unpacking some of the less vital boxes yet.

He had asked her to marry him three nights ago.

"Of course I will. You're going to be fine."

He sighed, and smiled despite the pain as he closed his eyes. One of the shinigami reached to change the blood-bag again, but she shook her head, and took hold of his hand.

"Knew I would, soon as I saw y…"

He trailed off, and she touched his face. He had lovely, blonde hair, but right now it was matted with a sticky covering of scarlet.

He'd bought her an obi to wear for her birthday, saying she needed something pretty to decorate the boring uniform that she put on each morning with such pride. It was dotted and smeared with blood now, from leaning against the bed. It should come out, she thought abstractedly as the hand touching his hair moved to find his pulse in his neck, weak now, barely there. If she put it into soak. His skin was growing cold, and now there was barely any blood coming out of his arm at all. They would turn a sort of raspberry pink, those stains, after that soak. She looked to the clock on the wall, to record the time of death. Then, a good bleaching, and it would be more of a faded mauve colour; another, and it would be gone entirely.

She nodded at the shinigami to leave. One of them was crying.

She took a step back from the bed, and looked at the massacre that had once been the man that she had loved. Another step backwards, until she hit the wall: there she rested for a moment, and started to laugh: all this time he had been worried about falling over and cutting himself badly and not being able to get help… and he'd been half blown apart, enough to kill _anyone_, and he still had had that slightly guilty look in his eyes that he had when he was in the Fourth division, though here it had been hazed by pain, as if to say, 'I'm so sorry that I'm taking up too much of your time. How thoughtless of me to have such a blood disorder, oh well, blame it on the parents, hey?" She suddenly realised that she was crying, and scrubbed at her eyes with her bloodied hands until, though they were red, people would just think that it was because of some patient's injury- you can't blame her for being a bit forgetful and not wiping the blood away, not when her department had just got blown up.

She took another deep breath, ignoring the copper-taste of the air. Already, on the wall the blood was drying into pretty patterns the colour of rust and dark brandy. It couldn't have been from him directly, she thought, her mind trying not to focus too hard; the other three must have smeared it here inadvertently as they were crowding the small room, it having soaking into their clothes. She ran a hand across it, leaving a fresh dash of red, and some of it flaked off underneath her gentle touch, to fall to the floor.

She closed her eyes, and then pushed herself off the wall. She had a department to run, and as she left the room she put on her face a kindly, composed smile- the sort of smile that people never could quite bring themselves to question. The sort of smile that could hide a thousand truths and never look like a lie; the sort of smile that would make people happy, but too intimidated to ever come close enough to scratch the surface. The sort of smile behind which she could pretend that she was okay, that she was here to help; that nothing had happened that had made it so it seemed that nothing in her world could ever be happy again.

She didn't take it off for the next hundred years, until the day she eventually became the Captain of the Fourth Division.

Then for just a moment it slipped, as she stared across the assembled ranks of the men and women that were now hers to protect and charge, as, at the back of the hall she could have sworn she saw a man with a ready smile and the awkward look of someone who is a little anxious about falling over.

Then, he was gone, and that smile slid right back into place.

No-one even noticed.


End file.
